In the Micro-CMS V2 CTF by Hackerone, we are given the following hints for the first flag:
- Regular users can only see public pages
- Getting admin access might require a more perfect union
- This immediately made me think about SQL Injection UNION attacks, which you can learn about here.
I began by checking for some basic SQL Injection vulnerabilities with a ‘ and admin’.
These returned errors, but did not provide any useful information.
I considered opening Burpsuite Intruder and attempting to brute force the username/password combination, but assumed it would be a difficult combination because of the union hint.
I tried a few different payloads, but struggled to blindly guess what the name of the table name was. Eventually, I did some cheating and checked online to see if I could learn the name of the table. I found a writeup saying that the table name was admins.
The final payload I used was:
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' UNION SELECT 'pass' AS password FROM admins WHERE '1' = '1
And for the password field:
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pass
Submitting that gave me message saying that I was logged in.
Clicking on the link to the Private Page displayed the flag.
The hint for the next flag said: What actions could you perform as a regular user on the last level, which you can’t now?
The “changelog” for page 1 also said: “This version fixed the multitude of security flaws and general functionality bugs that plagued v1. Additionally, we added user authentication; we’re still not sure why we didn’t think about that the first time, but hindsight is 20/20. By default, users need to be an admin to add or edit pages now.”
I used Burpsuite to modify requests and was unable to find an answer that way. Later, I learned that you can send different HTTP request methods using Curl from the command line using the “-X POST” argument. My final command was:
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curl -X POST https://7b44997630caaec756ff4da81538e9c9.ctf.hacker101.com/page/edit/1
This immediately gave the second flag.
The hint for the last flag was: Credentials are secret, flags are secret. Coincidence? I ended up using Burpsuite for this flag as well. My plan was to brute force the username and password, hoping it wasn’t too complex. I recalled from doing this in the past that the username and password were first names. In the past, I had used rockyou.txt, but that took quite a while.
This time, I used a wordlist with only first names in hopes that the challenge was still configured that way. I used Burpsuite’s intercept proxy and then sent the request to the intruder.
After configuring positions and uploading my wordlist, I began the attack and found that the username was “betsy”, seeing it had a different length than the rest of the responses.
Trying the username “betsy” with a random password returned an “Invalid password” error, so that showed me that I was on the correct track.
After running the attack for a few more minutes, the password “teresa” also returned a different length.
Using the username “betsy” and password “teresa” authenticated me and immediately returned the flag.
That means this challenge has been completely solved. Be sure to view some of my other Hacker101 CTF writeups!
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